Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2018. xi, 281 pp. (Tables.) US$32.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-2011-6.
Over twenty years ago, William Case asked “Can the ‘Halfway House Stand?’” in Southeast Asia—i.e., can hybrid regimes that are neither fully democratic nor fully authoritarian be sufficiently stable to avoid comprehensive liberalization without abandoning all pretenses of democracy (“Can the ‘Halfway House’ Stand? Semidemocracy and Elite Theory in Three Southeast Asian Countries,” Comparative Politics 28, no. 4 [1996]: 437–464). Contrary to widely-held expectations of the time, Southeast Asia’s hybrid regimes have proven highly resilient. Indeed, democratic features are ubiquitous across the region, with all countries aside from Brunei holding elections that have more candidates than positions. Yet procedural and structural deficits abound, with the region’s political elite often appearing impervious to evolving pressures from the populace. In short, the halfway house of semi-democracy has proven to be a remarkably stable equilibrium across the region.
Garry Rodan’s new book, Participation without Democracy, seeks to better understand this complex and heterogeneous regime type, specifically by examining the modes of political participation and representation that allow elites to contain challenges to their power without resorting to overtly repressive instruments of authoritarian control. The general premise is straightforward: certain forms of political representation serve to constrain political contestation more than to enhance it, often by fragmenting anti-elite forces or by depoliticizing potentially contentious issues. In short, Rodan notes that the scholarship on hybrid regimes has tended to focus on “what these regimes do not do” rather than on “what they actually do” (5). This book is an attempt to shift the focus to the latter through detailed empirical studies of Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia.
Rodan structures the book’s argument around a theoretical framework that he calls “Modes of Participation” (MOP). This framework introduces two concepts of non-democratic ideologies, which he calls consultative and particularist. Consultative ideologies rely on technocratic and apolitical modes of interfacing between state and society to address problems without catalyzing political contestation. These have the effect of depoliticizing contentious issues, thereby inhibiting them from becoming the basis for mobilization against elites. Particularist ideologies prioritize representation of discrete subgroups on the basis of ethnic, religious, regional, or gender identities, among others. This focus may fragment political opposition and crowd out mobilization on broad-based identities like class or political ideology. In tandem, these state-sponsored practices constrain anti-elite political challenges without requiring overt repression. Incorporating them into studies of regime resilience and transition, Rodan argues, provides analytic traction beyond what the traditional focus on electoral institutions offers.
The six empirical chapters examine consultative and particularist practices in Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia to illustrate the applicability of the MOP framework. In Singapore, the technocratic state has opted primarily for consultative practices. Rodan first focuses on the nominated member of parliament (NMP) scheme, which involves nominated parliamentary seats ostensibly meant to broaden the representativeness of the body. As these unelected NMPs are typically selected from segments of society where PAP support is thin, the manufactured representation may undermine mobilization efforts through cooptation. The second scheme involves public policy feedback institutions, including the Feedback Unit (later renamed REACH) and the state-led dialogue “Our Singapore Conversation.” These allow the state to selectively incorporate evolving public sentiments into its platform, thereby containing the ability of those sentiments to become the basis for political mobilization.
The more radical nature of social demands in the Philippines engendered different modes of participation. The party list system was intended to increase parliamentary representation for non-elite social elements, but in practice had a fragmenting effect, thus constraining challenges from unpredictable populist elements and ultimately entrenching elites further. Renewed anti-elite pressures led to the introduction of bottom-up budgeting in 2012. This new form of participation was intended to bypass the electoral dominance of entrenched elites, though its outcomes were decidedly mixed. By contrast, the inherently particularistic nature of Malaysian politics, in which race is an omnipresent feature, has limited the success of consultative processes. Notably, movements that manage to bridge the interests of discrete subgroups—for example, Bersih—made some headway towards challenging the dominance of Barisan Nasional elites, though they remained vulnerable to the ubiquitous ethno-religious appeals.
The MOP framework has relevance beyond these three Southeast Asian cases, as the emergence of new forms of representation reduces the space for political contestation even in what Rodan calls advanced capitalist societies. He argues that “innovative” practices like participatory democracy, delegative democracy, or active citizenship frequently bypass more traditional and ultimately empowering forms of liberal democracy. Participation without democracy, in other words, should factor into debates on democratic regression around the world.
Ultimately, this book is rich in thought-provoking theoretical and empirical points. It makes an important contribution to the literature on the complex relationship between markets and democratization, specifically by demonstrating that the former does not necessarily entail advances of the latter. The aim of this book is clearly to establish the MOP framework. The focus on that specific end leaves some broader lingering questions. In keeping with the Murdoch School of which Rodan is a leading member, the main treatment driving political evolution is “market capitalism.” While this is indisputable in a broad sense, market capitalism is also an extremely diverse category that includes the vast majority of economic systems today. The generalizability of the MOP framework would benefit from further systematic engagement with how specific attributes of different capitalist variants shape and interact with modes of participation. That focus also leaves somewhat ambiguous how other emerging factors that are tangentially related to market capitalism shape modes of participation. Further in keeping with the Murdoch School, the argument is highly structuralist in nature, which implicitly limits the space for individual agents. This has the advantage of keeping the analytic framework tractable, but some explanatory power is sacrificed. Could we imagine, for example, Malaysia’s dominant Barisan Nasional government being defeated without the individual presence of Mahathir Mohamad? These critiques are by no means fatal: politics in Southeast Asia draw interest in no small part due to their complexity and occasional defiance of established political science theories. Participation Without Democracy does not unravel that puzzle, but it provides a powerful new lens that will help the next generation of analysts make sense of the region.
Kai Ostwald
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada